THE FOURTEENTH LEWIS M. TERMAN WESTERN REGIONAL TEACHER'S CONFERENCE
Hyatt Regency, Irvine, California
April 9, 2008

Transforming the Learning Environment

THE FOURTEENTH LEWIS M. TERMAN
WESTERN REGIONAL TEACHERS' CONFERENCE
PRESENTERS AND PRESENTATIONS

Master Teachers tell of their approaches at creating a dynamic learning environment. Registration information can be obtained here.

DOUG BERNSTEIN, University of South Florida and Southampton University
Was it good for you, too?: Keeping teaching exciting for us and for them.

This talk for faculty presents ideas for building "highlights" into every class session so as to keep the teacher as interested in the class, year after year, as we want the students to be.

Doug Bernstein received his masters and Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Northwestern University in 1966 and 1968, respectively. From 1968 to 1998, he was on the psychology faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught classes ranging from 15 to 750 students, and served both as Associate Department Head and Director of Introductory Psychology. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Illinois, Courtesy Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida, and Visiting Professor and Education Advisor to the School of Psychology at Southampton University. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

His efforts to promote excellence in the teaching of psychology began in the late 1970s when he joined the NITOP program committee, and eventually became its chairman. In 1994, he founded the APS Preconference Institute on the Teaching of Psychology. He served for two years as the founding chairman of the Steering Committee for the APS Fund for the Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, and he remains a member of that committee.

He received several teaching awards at the University of Illinois, and in 2002 received the APA Distinguished Teaching in Psychology Award.

He has co-authored textbooks in Introductory, Abnormal, and Clinical Psychology as well as in Criminal Behavior, and Progressive Relaxation Training. He has contributed chapters to numerous handbooks on teaching, and with Sandra Goss Lucas, wrote Teaching Psychology: A Step by Step Guide. He occasionally offers workshops on teaching techniques and on textbook-writing for prospective authors. As a hobby, he collects student excuses.

JOANN BRANNOCK, Fullerton College
KAREN HUFFMAN, Palomar College
TERESA JACOB, Grossmont College
KATIE TOWNSEND-MERINO, Can?ada College
The Power of Persuasion

How good are you at reading and persuading others? Can you easily conceal your own thoughts and feelings? Are you a good poker player? During our two-hour workshop, you'll participate in a fun-filled simulation designed to test each of these skills, while also demonstrating numerous important psychological principles. This is one of the most effective simulation games we've ever found, and we'll provide specific tips and guidelines that will enable you to successfully recreate the same simulation in your own classes.

Karen Huffman, Joann Brannock, Teresa Jacob, and Katie Townsend-Merino have been honored many times as outstanding teachers and are long-time faculty friends who have devoted their careers to creatively teaching psychology. These women are all loved by their students because they enjoy their work. They will share their fun and excitement with you as they present one of their favorite "sure-fire" activities that has worked well for them.

JEFFREY MIO, California State University, Pomona
New Ideas in Student Writing

This lecture will discuss three kinds of student writing projects I have assigned that have been useful in increasing student writing across the curriculum--a project promoted by our English Department that our university has adopted to try to help prepare students to pass the Graduation Writing Test required on our campus--and also has the advantage of largely avoiding problems regarding plagiarism. These writing projects are "focused free writing," "personal opinion term papers," and "weekly reaction papers." The presentation of these topics will include attendee interaction opportunities.

Jeffery Scott Mio is a professor in the Psychology and Sociology Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he also serves as the Director of the M.S. in Psychology Program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1984. He taught at California State University, Fullerton, in the Counseling Department from 1984-86, then taught at Washington State University in the Department of Psychology from 1986-94, before accepting his current position at Cal Poly Pomona. His interests are in the teaching of multicultural issues, the development of allies, and how metaphors are used in political persuasion.

JUDY WILSON, Palomar College
Speed Mentoring

Early career teachers often wish they could "pick the brains" of their more experienced colleagues. Here's a chance to do just that. Based on the "speed dating" model of getting maximum info in minimum time, we will divide the conference participants into senior and junior members and then give opportunity to interact and learn. Think of your questions ahead of time, because you'll only have a few minutes before you have to move on to the next mentor.

Judy Wilson is an Assistant Professor at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA. She teaches Social Psychology, Introduction to Psychology and Psychology of Women. She will be pursuing her interests in the scholarship of teaching and learning by entering a doctorate program at UCSD in summer, 2008.

GEORGE SLAVICH, University of California, San Francisco
PHILIP ZIMBARDO, Stanford University, emeritus
Transformational Teaching in Psychology

Transformational Teaching (TT) is an approach to classroom instruction that utilizes experiential activities to enhance students' mastery of course concepts while promoting positive changes in how students learn and live. In this approach, teachers are conceptualized as change agents who guide students toward increased mastery and personal changes related to a course's main themes. Whereas mastery is exhibited in part by improved understanding of, and better memory for, key course concepts, change is indexed by the extent to which students reflect on and integrate the course themes into their lives. TT, in this vein, regards college courses as stages upon which life changing experiences can occur: It is about extending expectations for the impact that teachers can have, and for what students can accomplish, in the classroom.

George Slavich is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He completed undergraduate and graduate coursework in psychology and communication at Stanford University, received his PhD in psychology from the University of Oregon, and was subsequently a clinical psychology intern at McLean Hospital and a clinical fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Slavich's research interests focus broadly on life stress - its characteristics, causes, and consequences - in the context of major depressive disorder. He is also deeply devoted to teaching and mentoring. He founded the Stanford Undergraduate Psychology Conference in 2001 and the WPA Student Council in 2002, and helped found the Society of Clinical Psychology's Section on Graduate Student and Early Career Psychologists in 2006. For these and other contributions he was voted Graduate Teaching Fellow of the Year in 2003 by readers of the Oregon Daily Emerald and was awarded the McKeachie Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) in 2005. In 2006, he received an Instructional Resource Award from STP to develop Transformational Teaching - an approach to classroom instruction that utilizes experiential activities to enhance learning and the way that students live.

Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the "voice and face of contemporary American psychology" through his PBS TV series, Discovering Psychology; his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment; his oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life; his two popular trade books on Shyness (Shyness: What it is, what to do about it, and The Shy Child); and his most recent bestselling book, The Lucifer Effect, which summarizes more than 30 years of research on why good people engage in evil actions. He has been a Stanford University professor since 1968, and is currently on the faculty of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His more than 300 professional publications and 50 books convey his research interests in social psychology, with topics that include shyness, time perspective, madness, cults, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil. Aside from teaching psychology, which he has done for the past 50 years, Zimbardo has served as president of the American Psychological Association, president of the Western Psychological Association (twice), and Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations, and more than 1.5 million members). Currently, he is chair of the Western Psychological Foundation, executive director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism at Stanford University, and head of a philanthropic foundation in his name, which is dedicated to promoting student education in his ancestral Sicilian towns. Zimbardo has been given numerous awards and honors for his writing, teaching, research, and service to the profession. Most recently, he was awarded the 2005 Vaclav Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition and the 2008 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest.

Conference Co-Coordinators
Anne Duran, Associate Professor of Psychology
Beth Rienzi, Professor of Psychology
California State University, Bakersfield
(661) 654-2221 / aduran@csub.edu

Conference Assistance
Judy Wilson, Palomar College

Technical Coordinator
Luis Vega, Professor of Psychology
California State University, Bakersfield
lvega@csub.edu

Thank you for attending
We hope to see you in 2009.
The Fifteenth Lewis M. Terman Western Regional Teachers' Conference
Portland, Oregon
April 22, 2009
 

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